Support, Both Moral and Figural

Most of the past week has been dedicated to sewing eyelets. Soooo many eyelets. 70, to be precise. They actually went by fairly quickly, but I was so busy with other things (well, one thing… school) I didn’t have much time to work on them, so it took me about 5 nights to get them done, a few at a time. I was asked for a closer view of them, so here are the last few.

Once I finally finished sewing them, I took my sleeves, which were more like vast rectangles with sleeve caps and gussets, and set them in so I could lace up the kirtle and see how it looked.

Unfortunately, upon lacing it up, I realized that somehow there had been some sort of miscommunication between my left side and right side and the right side ended up with two extra eyelets!

This of course, was very upsetting. Luckily, I was hanging out on Zoom with my Wednesday Night Sewing group while doing this, and my very smart friend, Tellina, suggested that I re-lace it from the top down, which would cause the edges to meet up correctly at the bust and waist, and then unpick the center front seam and re-sew it. Through some sort of magic, that left only one lonely eyelet at the bottom. I just need to give it a mate and you’d never know it was a problem! Thank goodness I have smart friends.

Once that was sorted, I discovered that the kirtle was very comfortable. Too comfortable, really, as it was not really providing any support as was intended. So I marked it, took it off, took it in, re-attached the sleeves, put it back on, re-marked it, took it off, took it in again, etc. etc. until it was fitting more like I expected. I ended up having to take up the shoulders half an inch on the front panels, and over two inches on the breast support band area.

Then, I had my (extremely patient) husband pin my sleeve edges in something approximating what I wanted. I’m not sure how we made that work, honestly, because when we were doing it the fabric ended up bunched and twisted in some places and it didn’t really make sense. I had faith that I would figure it out, though, and with some very hand-wavy nonsense, managed to true up the seams in such a way that they turned out to fit how I wanted. I still need to figure out a closure method for the sleeves that will lay flat, though hidden lacing via lacing rings has been suggested as an alternative to buttons and hooks and eyes.